Heaps of Magic Notes

What was I doing all last week? I don’t remember. I think I was working on Wizards. That sounds right, but that feels like such a long time ago now. I’m up to my eyeballs in rituals right now, trying to establish internal consistency.

I think I touched on this with my post the other day about Evocation and the Natural state of magic, but each state is supposed to partially represent some of the “rules of reality,” and how their corresponding magic “breaks” that rule.

“Materials” magic, which focuses on what things are made of — currently bouncing between the Elemental state and, well, I haven’t found another good option yet — would be “broken” via Conjuration, which is the magic of creating “something from nothing” — it’s a bit of an oddity because I have some related class features.

Ultimately I want each class to reflect its magical state. Working at both ends, it should come along eventually, and I’ve made headway recently with the Natural state and Evocations, and of course “material” magic and Conjuration.

You can see I’m a fan of the pre-3e duality of Necromancy/Restoration. There’s such a thing as making a natural recovery, and then there’s helping things along with magic. Raising or reanimating the dead seems like a logical extreme.

I think it’s important to kind of separate Teleportation and make it an entire school of magic unto itself — if for no other reason than the fact that it’s practically the basis of the entire genre of FICTION IN SPACE. Seems legit, you know.

But there’s also the point that it complicates OR simplifies matters to such an extreme degree that if you didn’t make it a distinct school of magic, you might as well shoehorn it into another school — but then it’s hard to explain why it’s there.

Similarly, Alteration/Transmutation encompasses the entire item creation AND shape-shifting genres of fiction. I figure the difference between Edward Elric’s mechanical arm blade thingy and the One Ring is primarily one of scale.

I’m still not happy with how things are, which means I will undoubtedly continue tweaking the boundaries. Those funky “trap” spells bother me, but I’ve placed them in Conjuration for the time being (Explosive Runes, Glyph of Warding), including the majority of “protection” spells that game the system.

I didn’t think I was going to include a “Spell” section in my book at all, but with recent changes to organization of the Seven States, the inclusion of a spell/ritual section has become a reality again. I have some fun adventure ideas too.